The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that it has filed fraud charges against a Chicago-based health care financial services company and has frozen the assets of its co-founder who allegedly provided investors with forged financial statements to lure them into a $75 million investment scheme.

The SEC alleges that Canopy Financial Inc. and its former president and chief operating officer Jeremy J. Blackburn solicited investors for a private placement offering for preferred shares of Canopy. They provided investors with a falsified audit report purportedly from accounting firm KPMG as well as bank and financial statements with false and misleading information exaggerating Canopy’s financial condition. Blackburn misappropriated at least $1.7 million from the offering into his personal bank accounts.

The SEC’s complaint alleges that Canopy and Blackburn solicited investors from at least October 2008 through August 2009, providing them with documents devised to show that Canopy had a much healthier cash balance and larger client base than it actually did. Blackburn also falsified at least one bank statement to show an account balance of approximately $8.9 million, when in fact it was a custodial account of a Canopy client that held approximately $86,952. The SEC further alleges that Canopy raised approximately $75 million from investors and paid approximately $40 million in redemptions to existing investors, including Blackburn who redeemed 250,000 shares in exchange for approximately $1.625 million.

According to the SEC’s complaint, the fraud came to light when KPMG discovered that Canopy had been claiming that its financial statements for 2007 and 2008 were audited by KPMG. In fact, KPMG had never been retained by Canopy to audit its financial statements and had never opined on the financial condition of the company. KPMG issued a cease-and-desist letter to Canopy demanding that it stop the unauthorized use of KPMG’s name and the audit report purportedly issued by KPMG.

Expect more suits, governmental and otherwise, to come. Not to mention “discussions” among the company’s investors et al. And maybe editors at Inc. magazine, which pronounced Canopy no. 12 on its 2009 list of the “nation’s fastest-growing private companies.” Or, Ernst & Young LLP, which named Canopy’s since stepped aside CEO, Vik Kashyap, a finalist for its Entrepreneur Of The Year 2009 Award in Northern California.